he stammered, his eyes wide with fear.
“They were going to kill us all along! And if they don’t get us, the flames will burn us alive!”
“Let me go!” Dustfinger shouted at him. The smoke was stinging his eyes and making him cough.
Basta. He was staring at him through the smoke as if an invisible bond united them. The flames licked up at him in vain, and he raised his knife. Who was he aiming at? And why was he smiling like that? The boy.
Dustfinger pushed the two-fingered man aside. He shouted Farid’s name, but the noise all around drowned out his voice. The boy was still holding Meggie’s hand with one of his own, while his other held the knife, the knife that Dustfinger had given him in another life, in another story.
“Farid!” The boy did not hear him – and Basta threw. Dustfinger saw the knife go into that thin back. He caught the boy before he fell to the ground, but he was already dead. And there stood Basta with his foot on another dead body, smiling. Why not? He had hit his target, and it was the target he had been aiming for all along: Dustfinger’s heart, his stupid heart. It broke in two as he held Farid in his arms, it simply broke in two, although he had taken such good care of it all these years. He saw Meggie’s face, heard her sobbing Farid’s name, and put the boy’s body into her arms. His legs were trembling so much that he had difficulty straightening up. Everything about him was trembling, even the hand holding the knife that he had pulled out of the boy’s back. He wanted to get at Basta, through the fire and the fighting men, but Silvertongue was faster. Silvertongue, who had plucked Farid from his own story and whose daughter sat there weeping as if her own heart had had a knife driven into it, like the boy. .
Mo ignored the flames moving toward him. He thrust his sword through Basta’s body as if he had never done anything else in his life, as if from now on his trade was killing. Basta died with an expression of surprise still on his face. He fell into the fire, and Dustfinger stumbled back to Farid, who was still held in Meggie’s arms.
What had he expected – that the boy would come back to life just because his killer was dead?
No, the black eyes were still empty, empty as a deserted house. There was none of the joy in them now that had always been so difficult to banish. And Dustfinger kneeled there on the trodden earth, while Resa comforted her weeping daughter, and men were fighting, killing, and being killed around them, and he no longer had any idea what he was doing here, what was going on, why he had ever come beneath these trees, the same trees that he had seen in his dream. In the worst of all dreams. And now it had come true.
Chapter 72 – An Exchange
The blue of my eyes was extinguished tonight The red gold of my heart
– Georg Trakl, “By Night”, Poems
They almost all escaped. The fire saved them, the fury of the bear, the Black Prince’s men – and Mo, who practiced killing that gray morning as if he meant to become a master of the craft. Basta was left dead under the trees, along with Slasher and so many of their men that the ground was covered with their corpses as if with dead leaves. Two of the strolling players had been killed, too – and Farid.
Farid.
Dustfinger himself was pale as death when he carried him back to the mine. Meggie walked beside him all the long, dark way. She held Farid’s hand, as if that could help, feeling as sore inside herself as if it would never get better.
She was the only one whom Dustfinger did not send away when he had laid Farid down on his cloak in the most remote of the galleries. No one dared approach him as he bent over the dead boy and wiped the soot from his brow. Roxane did try to talk to him, but when she saw the expression on his face she left him alone. He allowed only Meggie to sit beside Farid, as if he had seen his own pain in her eyes. So they both sat with him in the depths of Mount Adder, as if they had come to the end of all stories. Without a single word still left to say.
Perhaps night had fallen outside by the time Meggie heard Dustfinger’s voice. It came to her as if from far away, through the fog of pain that enveloped her as if she would never find her way out.
“You’d like him back, too, wouldn’t you?”
It was difficult for her to turn her eyes away from Farid’s face. “He’ll never come back,” she whispered, and looked at Dustfinger. She didn’t have the strength to speak any louder. All her strength was gone, as if Farid had taken it away with him. He had taken everything away with him.
“There’s a story.” Dustfinger looked at his hands, as if what he was talking about was written there. “A story about the White Women.”
“What kind of story?” Meggie didn’t want to hear any more stories ever again. This one had broken her heart for all time.
Nonetheless, there was something in Dustfinger’s voice. .
He bent over Farid and wiped some soot from his cold forehead. “Roxane knows it,” he said.
“She’ll tell it to you. Just go to her and .. and tell her I’ve had to go away. Tell her I’m going to find out if the story is true.” He spoke with a strange kind of hesitation, as if it were infinitely difficult to find the right words. “And remind her of my promise – that I’ll always find a way back to her, wherever I am. Will you tell her that?”
What was he talking about? “Find out?” Meggie’s voice was husky with tears. “Find out what exactly?”
“Oh, people say this and that about the White Women. Much of it’s just superstition, but there’s sure to be some truth in it somewhere. Stories are always like that, aren’t they? No doubt Fenoglio could tell me more, but to be honest I don’t want to ask him. I’d rather ask them in person.”
Dustfinger straightened up. He stood there looking around him, as if he had forgotten where he really was.
The White Women. “They’ll be coming soon, won’t they?” Meggie asked him anxiously. “Coming for Farid.”
But Dustfinger shook his head, and for the first time since Farid’s death he smiled, that strangely sad smile that Meggie had never seen on any face but his, and that she had never entirely understood. “No, why should they? They’re sure of him already. They come only if you’re still clinging to life, if they have to lure you to them with a look or a whispered word. Everything else is superstition. They come while you’re still breathing, but very close to death. They come when your heart is beating more and more faintly, when they can smell fear, or blood, as in your father’s case. If you die as quickly as Farid you go to them entirely of your own accord.”
Meggie caressed Farid’s fingers. They were colder than the stone where she was sitting. “Then I don’t understand,” she whispered. “If they aren’t coming at all, how will you ask them anything?”
“I shall summon them,” replied Dustfinger. “But you had better not be here when I do it, so will you go to Roxane and tell her what I have said to you?”
She was going to ask more questions, but he put a finger on his lips. “Please, Meggie!” he said. He didn’t often call her by her name. “Tell Roxane what I have told you – and say .. say I’m sorry.
Now, off you go.”
Meggie sensed that he was afraid, but she did not ask him what of, because her heart was asking other questions. How could it be true that Farid was dead, and how would it feel to have him dead in her heart forever? She caressed his still face one last time before she got to her feet.
